Sorry, sci-fi fans: pretty much anyone who's imagined what a near-light-speed spacecraft would look like has got it wrong, because they've forgotten its interaction with photons.
Not only that, but according to a couple of scientists working for Raytheon, it doesn't matter whether Einstein's proposition that you'll never …

Twitter's Meerkat-strangling live streaming app Periscope has had its first privacy SNAFU, leaking the titles (but not the content) of videos meant for private circulation only.
Periscope allows users to stream live video into their Twitter feeds. The app debuted mere days after a very similar app, Meerkat, became the Bong! …

Google has signed a deal to collaborate with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon to work on surgical robotics applications.
The J&J statement says the two companies will “bring together capabilities, intellectual property and expertise” in building a robotic-assisted surgical platform, with the kind of supporting sentence that …

The best way to protect corporate secrets is to announce them at a tech conference in Japan, which is why word is only just arriving of AMD's February reveal of a clustering roadmap.
Consumer and commercial business lead Junji Hayashi told the PC Cluster Consortium workshop in Osaka that the 2016 release CPU cores (an ARMv8 and …

Cisco has worked through data centre and switch products that may have been vulnerable to the Row Hammer vulnerability, and decided there's nothing with the bridge brand on the front that's subject to the bug.
Back at the beginning of the month, Google cheerily announced to the world that writing and re-writing memory in DRAMs …

The eager Igors of CERN are going to have to wait a little longer before they try to destroy the universe: it turns out that the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has a short circuit in one of its dipole circuits.
Mere days before the LHC's keenly-anticipated Earthproton-shattering return to operations, the main dipole …

MIT and University of Belgrade boffins have taken a big step in applying the quantum property of entanglement to macro systems: they're claiming to have roped together more than 2,900 rubidium atoms with a single photon.
In what lead author Vladan Vuletić says is a “new class” of entangled states, in work that they believe will …

Rather than pull out all the stops on network function virtualisation (NFV), telcos would like to stage their implementations one piece at a time, according to Canadian vendor Accedian Networks.
That's the rationale behind the approach the company announced late last week, in which it wants to offer an enterprise-to-data-centre …

A flash memory reformat left NASA's Mars rover Opportunity with a brief episode of what the agency calls “amnesia” – thankfully, without any loss of scientific data.
NASA adds that Opportunity was also able to continue its normal activities, such as using its robotic arm to examine a rock target called Athens.
It's one of a …

Puppet Labs is adding code management and updates to its Node Manager in a big refresh in Puppet Enterprise 3.8.
The company is particularly touting Docker container provisioning, as well as provisioning for bare metal and AWS infrastructure.
Tim Zonca, director of product marketing at Puppet Labs, told Vulture South the …

When Samsung shoved the Galaxy S5 out the door last year, one of the things it put front and centre was the new ability to log on with one's fingerprint.
Fast forward twelve months and Sammy looks to be giving that idea a finger of a different sort, by signing a deal with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to put iris- …

NASA has decided that putting a lump of rock from an asteroid into orbit around the Moon is better than trying to hook a whole asteroid.
The ARM – Asteroid Redirection Mission – has settled on what the space agency called “Option B”, sending a spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid big enough to have boulders on the surface and …

Intel has set some rumours to rest, giving a media and analyst briefing outlining details of its coming 60-plus core Knights Landing Xeon Phi chip.
Opening the bag to let the cat see a little bit of light, Intel has told journalists at a briefing at its Hillsboro, Oregon fab that the “honking big die” for the Knights Landing Phi …

Cisco's turned up vulnerabilities in automation software that open the door to denial-of-service and limited access to devices.
The company's Autonomic Network Infrastructure (ANI) feature in IOS provides self-management for various IPv6-supporting routers and Ethernet switches.
One of the ANI features is to remove the need for …

Take a look at mobile standards like LTE and you'll notice that duplexing is difficult: it's either accomplished by separating uplink and downlink in time or frequency.
Why? Because it's really hard to use closely-spaced frequencies for uplink and downlink in the small space of a smartphone: the two signals will inevitably …

The UK press has noticed that NASA's Small Object Database Browser seems to show an asteroid passing close to Earth – and therefore we're all going to die on Friday.
We won't: while object 2014-YB35 will pass within 2.8 million miles (4.48 million km) of Earth, which qualifies as a “near miss” in astronomical terms, it's not …

A comparative analysis of supercomputer ownership by US universities seems to suggest that TOP500-class iron gives institutions a quantifiable edge in physics, chemistry, civil engineering and evolutionary biology.
In the kind of rational decision-making that will upset HPC sales teams, the Clemson University research is …

Australians are getting their regular consultant-driven exhortation to ride the “digital economy” horse to wealth and prosperity, even though it turns out that for every digitally disruptive dollar that flows from the fingers of keyboard warriors, two dollars escapes the science lab into the economy.
We're working with a few …

The idea that the planned fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) rollout of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) may have ended up meeting its cost targets has received a high-profile endorsement from emeritus professor Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne.
Speaking to US conference, professor Tucker said the claim in the …

It had to happen, we suppose: since even a utility-grade wind turbine might ship with a handy Webby control interface, someone was bound to do it badly.
That's what's emerged in a new ICS-CERT advisory: CVE-2015-0985 details how turbines from US manufacturer XZERES allow the user name and password to be retrieved from the …

IBM has stated explicitly what its recent strategy had already suggested implicitly: Big Blue has decided to get more strategic in China.
Having confirmed it's throwing its Power chip blueprints at system manufacturers in the Middle Kingdom, IBM's CEO Virginia Rometty has told Reuters IBM needs to go beyond treating China as a …

Metadata retention, which George Brandis has most frequently described as reading the front of an envelope, is also like standing outside a lawyer's office watching who goes in and out.
That metaphor emerged perhaps accidentally from communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, in explaining why there's no need to exempt what many …

Interview
At Cisco Live Sydney, your humble hack at Vulture South got to spend time with distinguished engineer and CCIE number 1609 Alvaro Retana to talk about the future of routing, networks that can run themselves, and the internet at large.
The Register: What are the problems we're trying to solve in the world of routing today … what …

A two-year project inside Facebook has culminated in the release of software to test how well applications and servers work under degraded network conditions – all the way down to rickety 2G.
The idea behind Augmented Traffic Control, open-sourced on GitHub, is to improve the delivery of material on under-performing networks. …

Australia is home to the largest asteroid impact crater on Earth. The 400km-wide crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which is often attributed with wiping out the dinosaurs.
The new find in the Warburton Basin in Central Australia is a stunning 400km-wide impact zone from a huge asteroid that …

A programmer better known for work on Arduino has shown off handy vintage mainframe skills, getting an ancient IBM 1401 to buzz away on its 1403 line printer to produce the classic Mandelbrot fractal image.
It's not as trivial as it sounds. In this blog post on the “12-minute Mandelbrot”, Ken Shirriff explains that programming …

Orbital angular momentum – in photonics short-handed as “twisted light” – can help expand the capacity of comms systems using quantum communications.
Since quantum key distribution (QKD) is already a commercial, if pricey, market segment, quantum communication science is of a more practical application today than quantum …

Juniper Networks and Mirantis are getting cozy in an arrangement designed to get better scalability out of OpenStack clouds.
The two outfits announced the tie-up at the end of last week, with Mirantis saying the relationship will bake Juniper's Contrail into its OpenStack environment.
Contrail will sit alongside the existing …

The Cupertino fruit factory has decided to boot old versions of Windows out of the camp, quietly not-announcing that only Windows 8 and 10 will run on the latest flavours of the dual-boot "Boot Camp" utility that ships with this year's new Macs.
The new policy means that the recently-announced MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro …

With every development in Australia's data retention debate, the question arises: “how can I stop the government getting its hands on my metadata?”
Routinely, often non-technical journalists give the glib answer to “use encryption”, rattle off their favourite list of technologies, and over-simplify things to the point of danger …

While in Melbourne enduring the antipodean version of Cisco Live!, The Register's networking desk met veep and CTO Bret Hartman. Here's what he told us about network security, a field he feels is basically doomed. Forever.
The Register: The last twelve months tells us we have insecure devices connected through gateways, sending …

After two years digesting its acquisition of LineRate, F5 Networks is now shipping one of the key outcomes of the buy, a fully-virtualised lightweight load balancing solution.
As part of a broader virtualisation push that also includes an iron-free version of its Big-IP application delivery controller.
According to director of …

Broadcom wants a bigger footprint in the router and switch market with the next iteration of its top-line silicon, the StrataDNX line.
While conceding that merchant silicon isn't going to push Cisco or Juniper Networks out of the network core where the biggest traffic flows exist, Broadcom reckons the ability to support beyond- …

D-Link is moving to patch a bunch of vulnerabilities in consumer products, which almost certainly means that most users either won't know the patch is happening or won't run the update.
The first CERT advisory, here, covers DCS-93 series network cameras (models 930L, 931L, 932L and 933L using version 1.04 2014-04-21 of the …

As a power source, hydrogen has a bunch of problems, but at least one of them – the cost of obtaining the gas – might be closer to a solution.
Right now, most commercial quantities of hydrogen are derived from fossil fuels because electrolysis of water into hydrogen is expensive.
Boffins from the University of NSW reckon that a …

At some point between Version 6.2.2 and Version 8.0.3, Apple has accidentally jettisoned private browsing in Safari.
As described by Macissues, users of recent Safari versions on the newest flavours of OSX are finding that so-called “private” URLs are turning up in the SQLite database that stores Favicons.
In other words, if …

Updated
A former banking industry IT executive has been arrested in Sydney for bribery over the handling of "lucrative" contracts.
Police in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) made the arrest, but have provided scant detail about the matter. But the contract must have been big: as the boys in blue say “To date, more than US$1 …

Video
Scientists working at the edge of the creepy have demonstrated fine-grained remote control of critters known as giant flower beetles, with the idea that they could carry payloads into difficult places in activities like search and rescue.
The boffins have shown off their test subjects being instructed to take off, turn and hover …

Four researchers, a zmap scan and a Friday afternoon have shown that while sys admins are cleaning the FREAK bug out of their Web servers, broadband routers remain a perpetual feast.
The boffins from Royal Holloway at the University of London – Martin Albrecht, Davide Papini, Kenneth Paterson and Ricardo Villanueva-Polanco – …

SAP is wrapped up in possibly the silliest conspiracy theorising The Register has seen yet, issuing an angry denial that having sold software to government agencies means it built backdoors into its products.
Well – it's probably an angry denial, but it's phrased with the good manners of corporate PR.
The kerfuffle began with …

BlackBerry has joined the lengthening list of FREAKed-out vendors, publishing a list of currently-vulnerable software and promising fixes as soon as possible.
The famous FREAK is the vulnerability that OpenSSL inherited from the 1990s, because America's rules at the time meant “export-grade” encryption was limited to a maximum …

Australia's Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has his eye on the revenues collected by multinational online ad platforms like Google.
Apparently raising a white flag on the government stopping multinationals from shipping profits offshore to avoid tax, Turnbull has floated the idea of levying Australia's goods and …

Updated
An Australian faces life behind bars in the USA after entering a guilty plea for his role in Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road operation.
Peter Phillip Nash, who went by the tag “Samesamebutdifferent” on the online drug bazaar, put his hands up to narcotics and money laundering charges.
Nash was arrested in the Australian city of …

Tor is regularly recommended as a vital privacy protection technology, and just as regularly, researchers discover ways to de-anonymise users, and the latest of these has just hit Arxiv.
The research, led by boffins from Princeton, demonstrates ways to de-anonymise Tor users with access to just one end of a communication path, …

Users with a bent for nasty content and too much trust in shortened links are helping to spread a Facebook worm, according to researchers at Malwarebytes.
Senior researcher Jérôme Segura has documented a Kilim-family worm that attracts users by promising smut with a link that's been shrunk by link-shortening service ow.ly.
The …

Oracle has released a new secure-boot version of its Linux, but the new issuance is attracting criticism that it's not actually secure.
The issue, according to a series of Tweets by Linux engineer Matthew Garrett, is that Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel supports kexec_load() and carries the same signature as the kernel …

Yahoo! has shown off an OpenPGP-based end-to-end e-mail encryption it says will be offered as a plug-in by the end of the year.
Its aim is to make PGP-based encryption more accessible to the everyday layperson.
Described in this blog post by Purple Palace chief information security officer Alex Stamos, the mail encryption code …

Cisco admins will be watching and waiting for fixes, with the company announcing that many of its OpenSSL implementations are carrying a bunch of post-POODLE fleas.
The Borg has been looking over its kit and software since the OpenSSL project disclosed a bunch of vulns in January, and on March 10 detailed the impacts it's …

Ericsson's move to focus on software is to hit another 2,200 jobs in Sweden, the telco vendor has announced.
The cuts focus on roles in R&D and supply, the company's statement says, but admin and sales roles will also be affected, along with external consultants.
The vendor says R&D remains important, but reducing the number of …

China's Alibaba and SAIC Motor Corp have decided the country needs to get its cars connected to the Internet, and have inked a $US160 million deal to get the ball wheels rolling.
According to Reuters, the joint venture between the two will be worth a billion yuan, and targets 2016 as the launch date for the Middle Kingdom's …